‘Well, training sounds a bit formal.’
‘Then maybe it should. Maybe training’s what you need. Lots of it. Every fucking day. Are we speaking the same language here?’
There was a long silence. Finally, Pete cleared his throat. He looked shaken.
‘Do you want to know about Hennessey? Only—’
‘Bollocks to Hennessey.’
‘Only it’s Cath’s job, isn’t it? Her patch? Up at the Marriott?’
Faraday fought the hot gusts of anger welling up inside him. Pete, as reckless as ever, was offering a trade. Information in return for Faraday’s silence. Pathetic. He was in close again, close enough to smell the bacon on Pete’s breath.
‘Uniform was called to a torched Mercedes last night,’ he said. ‘I won’t bore you with the details because I expect Cath’ll tell you anyway.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘About the chassis number. It’s badly deformed, but my money’s on Hennessey. It’s right what people say, you know. You want a result, you leave it to the professionals. OK?’
Without waiting for an answer, Faraday turned on his heel and left the room. At the door on the top landing, he glanced back. Pete was right behind him.
‘Shame,’ Faraday said softly. ‘You might have made a decent copper.’
Winter spent the latter half of the morning at the St Helier marina, several acres of wooden pontoons and gleaming yachts. The marina offices were under siege from a small army of visiting skippers, all of them with one problem or another, and when Winter finally managed to corner the guy who seemed to run the place he got nowhere with Hennessey’s name. The guy might or might not have phoned. A walk up and down the pontoons would tell Winter whether he was here at the moment, and while he might have booked ahead, or stayed recently, late June was no time to be combing through the records. If the guy had a mobile, why not phone him?
None the wiser, Winter made a last precautionary check on the pontoons. Pete Lamb had given him a mobile number for Hennessey, but the bloody man never answered it. Without the name of a yacht, or even a description, he knew he was reduced to relying on a chance sighting, and with only a video surveillance still and a couple of photocopied mug shots from the newspapers to go on, even then he was riding his luck. Towards noon, with time pressing, he jacked it in. On the phone, Nikki had stipulated half-twelve for lunch and he still hadn’t a clue where the restaurant was.
It was a Thai place, wedged into the ground floor of a tall, narrow, sturdy-looking building that must once have been a warehouse of some kind. Winter managed to get a table at the back, set slightly apart, and he stood up the moment Nikki stepped in from the street. She was wearing a lightweight leather jacket, black again, over a grey T-shirt, and she didn’t appear to have changed the jeans. With any luck, thought Winter, she might give him another song.
The Chardonnay he’d ordered was already a third down. She nodded when he pulled it from the cooler, and then cupped the full glass in her hands the way a child might if she was very, very cold. In daylight, she was even more striking: wide blue eyes in that same almond-shaped face, eyes that never seemed to blink, eyes that looked right through you. When Winter introduced his interest in Hennessey, she simply nodded. Her father had been through all this already and she’d help him any way she could.
Winter, keen for her to see him making notes, took her back to the beginning: her referral from the GP, her first dealings with Hennessey, the endless trips to London, the interminable examinations, the way he was so sure he could rid her of pain.
‘But he didn’t,’ Winter pointed out.
‘No, but I didn’t know that then. This thing was a learning curve and I was at the bottom.’
‘Did you like him? Get on with him?’
She shook her head. Her glass was already empty.
‘Liking him wasn’t in it. You don’t go to church because you like God, do you?’
‘He thought he was God?’
‘No, I did. I was nineteen, twenty. He was the big man up in Harley Street, the man everyone said was the best. Sometimes I used to think he had a little package, like a present, in a drawer in that big desk of his. There’d be a cure in it, for me, and as long as I was good it would all turn out OK.’
‘Good?’
‘Polite, you know. Respectful. Know my place. Lie back. Open my legs. Do what I was told. The last thing that crossed my mind was whether I liked him or not.’
Winter’s pen slowed and then stopped. There was a question here, an important question.
‘Do you think he liked you?’
Nikki was looking at the bottle. Winter didn’t move. At length, her face creased into a smile and she nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think he liked me very much.’
Cathy Lamb intercepted Faraday in the car park at Southsea nick before he had had a chance to make it to the entrance door at the back of the building. Faraday could tell she’d been waiting for him by the expression on her face. Pete Lamb’s been on to her already, he thought, and she’s driven down here to sort it out.
‘Get in the car,’ he told her.
He returned to the Mondeo and unlocked it. Parked in the sun, the temperature was already beginning to climb inside.
Cathy was about to unpack all the baggage she’d brought down from Fratton, get it all off her chest, but Faraday beat her to it. She’d lied to him about her onetime husband. And lying was the last thing he expected from someone with her kind of ambition.
‘You’re an acting DI, for God’s sake, Cath. This force relies on people like us. Not just all the service performance targets crap, but stuff that matters. Pete’s a lunatic. First he gets pissed and nearly blows someone away. Then he gets suspended on full pay and promptly sorts himself a job. What’s he got? Some kind of death wish?’
‘He’s bored,’ she said stonily. ‘Needed something to do.’
‘Yeah, and you told me he was sailing, getting ready for Cowes Week. Do you know what really hurts? Not him busting the regulations. Not even him touting for a bunch of estate agents. No, what really hurts is the fact that you lied. To me.’
‘I had to.’
‘Had to?’ He stared at her.
‘Yeah.’ Cathy turned her head away and began to wind down the window. ‘If I’d been straight about it you wouldn’t have known what to do.’
‘How come?’
‘It would have been awkward, split loyalties. So I thought it best, you know, to gloss it a bit.’
‘To lie.’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded, looking at him at last. ‘To lie.’
There was a long silence. Faraday thought of all the things he wanted to say. That she’d taken him for a prat. That she’d laid herself wide open to compromise. That she’d started a sequence of events she couldn’t control. That the clatter of falling dominos would haunt her service record for years to come. That she could have ended up selling shampoo in Boots. That she could have ended up inside. Instead, he dealt with it in the only way he knew would really hurt her.
‘Willard wants me to take over the Hennessey inquiry,’ he said coldly. ‘The SOCO’s still sorting out the Mercedes and I’ll have a squad put together after lunch. It’s just as well you’re here because one of the things I’ll need to do is debrief Winter. As long as he’s up for it.’
Cathy stared at him. Her mouth had compressed into a very thin line and she was fighting to contain her temper. Finally, she snapped.
‘Shall I tell you why I really did it?’
‘Did what?’
‘Pulled Pete in? Took advantage? Because this job’s not just hard, it’s fucking near impossible. You might have forgotten about legwork, about getting out there, about putting whispers about, but I haven’t, thank God, and neither have people like Winter. If sitting in an office put villains away, we wouldn’t have any criminals left. If paperwork took care of it, we’d all be in the fucking West Indies by now, lying on some beach and getting pissed all day. But it do
esn’t, does it? It’s the paperwork and the regulations you have to box off. Otherwise we’d be dead in the water. You know it and I know it. Only difference is that I’ve done something about it.’
‘Is that some kind of explanation?’ Faraday reached for the door handle. ‘Only I’m really busy.’
Cathy ignored the sarcasm.
‘Another thing,’ she said hotly. ‘Hennessey’s the first bit of decent crime to come my way. And now you’ve stolen it. Just the way I knew you always would.’
Faraday glanced across at her. She was practically shaking with rage.
‘You don’t lie to friends, Cath,’ he said quietly, ‘not if they mean anything to you.’ He began to get out of the car, then paused. ‘And it’s not theft, by the way. Just a reassignment.’
Nikki McIntyre was drunk. The second bottle of Chardonnay, which Winter had barely touched, had filmed her eyes and brought a strange animation to her manner. Her upper body dipped and swayed over the bowls of haw mok and pla chien, in much the same way as she’d addressed the piano, and when Winter pressed her for details, she became almost voluble.
‘He never wore gloves,’ she murmured, ‘not once.’
‘Didn’t you wonder why?’
‘Of course I did. But it’s horrible asking questions like that. I thought there must be some good medical reason. I could hardly insist, could I?’
‘Why not? You were paying, weren’t you, or at least BUPA were? That makes you the client, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, but client is the last thing you feel. That’s not the way it works with Hennessey. You’re his patient. You’ve been referred. You’re his property, his chattel. He’s the top man. He’s in sole charge. And he makes bloody sure you know it.’ She lifted a chopstick and poked at a glistening hillock of mangetout. ‘It sounds medieval, and in many ways it is. You’re forever on the receiving end, and if it hurts, then too bad. Your duty is to shut up. You never make a fuss.’
Winter nodded, scribbling down another note, struck by her use of tenses. This experience of hers was so vivid, so real, it might have happened only hours ago.
Nikki was talking about Hennessey’s little jokes. Winter reached for the Chardonnay and refilled her glass.
‘Jokes?’
‘He used to make me these promises. One was about babies. He said I’d always be able to have babies. The other promise was about my play pen.’
‘Play pen?’ Winter was pursuing a sliver of fish.
‘Here.’ Nikki gestured below the table cloth at her lap. ‘How he’d always treat it with the respect it deserved. How lucky I was to have one so beautiful.’
Winter looked up.
‘He said that?’
‘Every time.’
‘Did it go any further?’
‘Of course. He examined me.’
‘Without gloves?’
‘Yes, and every time – every time – he insisted on an operation.’
‘Then and there?’
‘Absolutely. He used to get me up to the hospital, the Advent, for consultations, but every time it would end in the operating theatre. I think he must have had the theatre pre-booked. It got so I’d automatically pack my overnight case every time. He made a joke about that, too. Me and my little case. Like I was his girlfriend on some sordid date.’
‘And these were serious operations?’
‘Serious enough to need anaesthetic.’
‘Did he explain them? Justify them?’
‘Not really. Information wasn’t something he was ever really into. He probably thought I was too thick to understand. No, he just went ahead and did whatever he did.’
‘And this went on for …?’
‘Seven years.’ She offered Winter a small, bitter-sweet laugh. ‘You’re talking to the world’s expert on ankle stirrups and those dilator things. Ever wondered how vulnerable that might make you feel? Someone like Hennessey poking around inside you?’
‘But you stayed with him,’ Winter pointed out. ‘You put up with it.’
‘Of course.’ Nikki shrugged. ‘But then he was a doctor. And doctors are people you can trust.’
Winter looked away for a moment. He’d phoned Joannie in Hove first thing this morning, just to check how she was getting on. Her mum had taken the call, explaining that Joan wasn’t too good. Rough night. Little sleep. And a constant, nagging pain in her tummy. She hadn’t gone as far as spelling it out, but the inference was plain enough. Her daughter should be tucked up at home under proper medical supervision. Not abandoned by a husband too busy to care.
‘Doctors can be bastards,’ he said softly. ‘Take it from me.’
Nikki gazed at him, seeming not to understand. The nod was automatic. He might have said any bloody thing.
‘This Hennessey,’ he continued, leaning forward, trying to get her to concentrate, ‘have you seen him at all recently? Heard from him?’
She gave the question some thought. Then she shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. I’d remember that, wouldn’t I?’
Winter imagined she would, but wasn’t happy with the answer. There was something in there, something opaque he couldn’t penetrate. He tried again, mentioning Hennessey’s interest in the marina. Had he ever talked about having a yacht?
‘Never. He went to the races. He talked about that all the time. But not boats, no.’
‘And he hasn’t tried to get in touch with you? The last couple of weeks?’
Nikki threw back her head and laughed.
‘Socially, you mean? For a chat about old times?’ The laughter died. She leaned forward, suddenly intense. ‘There’s a guy you ought to talk to, Mr Detective. My poor old dad might have mentioned him, I don’t know, but I’m going to write down his name for you. You’ll find him in the big hospital in Portsmouth, the QA. He saved my life after the last time Hennessey had a go at me. I’d come back home from London. I had a pain like you wouldn’t believe. I was screaming half the night. I was climbing the walls it was so bad. The GP put me in an ambulance and got me down to the hospital and this guy sorted me out. Go and see him. Ask him what he found. And then ask him what it adds up to.’
Winter watched her reach for his pen and pad and scribble down a name. Alan Ashworth.
‘And you’re still telling me you haven’t seen Hennessey since? You’re absolutely sure about that?’
‘I’m telling you, I’d see him in hell first. That man is evil. He’s been inside me. He’s robbed me. He’s pillaged me. Bits of me have gone for ever, Mr Detective. I can’t tell you what that feels like.’
Winter, slightly chastened, reached for the bottle again, but it was empty. Then he turned back to Nikki, struck by another thought.
‘That song you did last night. Who was the friend who died?’
Nikki stared into her glass.
‘Me,’ she said softly.
Sixteen
Friday, 23 June, afternoon
Faraday finally got to see Willard shortly after lunch. The Detective Superintendent’s office lay in the Major Crimes Suite, a heavily secured first-floor complex at the rear of Fratton police station. Five-digit locks barred entry to the suite, home to a sizeable task force of specially selected detectives who devoted themselves exclusively to long-running major crime investigations. To warrant the attentions of these men, you had to have murdered, raped or got yourself involved in a serious drugs or robbery scam.
A posting to a Major Incident Team was regarded as a top career move by many detectives, a chance to escape the treadmill of volume crime, but Faraday had never fancied it. All detection boiled down to teamwork and co-ordination, but blokes on the MITs of Faraday’s rank, Dls, rarely had the kind of freedom that came with the job at divisional level. Instead, wrestling with a stranger rape or a complex drugs case, they would inevitably be reporting to a senior investigating officer like Willard himself. Not that Faraday had anything against Willard as an SIO. He simply pr
eferred running his own squad, drawing up his own battle plan, and if that meant missing out on quality crime, then so be it.
Willard had just come back from a civil unrest exercise over at the big force training HQ at Netley. In an earlier phone conversation about Hennessey, he’d agreed that they were now looking at a missing-person inquiry and asked Faraday to take formal charge. While the surgeon’s disappearance didn’t yet justify investigation by an MIT, it did need someone of Faraday’s experience at the helm. Cathy Lamb was doing a terrific job in the northern part of the city, but dumping this on her would be a lousy use of resources.
‘Agreed?’
Faraday nodded, thinking of Cathy in the car park. At full throttle she could be very impulsive, and Faraday had half-expected her to get to Willard first. For the fact that she obviously hadn’t, he was deeply grateful.
‘I talked to the SOCO about the Mercedes,’ Faraday said. ‘He’s got the arson investigator down from Chepstow and they had a good poke through the residues. He’s pretty confident about accelerants, but there’s nothing in there to suggest a body. The thing was gutted come the finish.’
‘House to house?’
‘I’ve had blokes on the estate all morning. So far it’s a blank. First most of them knew, the car was on fire.’
‘And the kids?’
‘Still at school. We’ve got names and addresses. We saw some of them last night.’
Willard, who made a speciality of doing at least two things at once, was looking at next week’s duty rosters.
‘How many bodies do you need, then?’
‘Half a dozen for now, and we can blitz it. Hennessey has a house in Beaconsfield and another rented place in the New Forest. Then there’ll be the consulting rooms in Harley Street and wherever else he worked.’
‘I thought you said he was struck off?’
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